Wordsworth’s investment in a moving subject is well established, whether one is considering accounts of his own European rambles or his many portraits of people in motion. In his most famous developmental narrative in “Tintern Abbey,” however, he brackets and discards the “glad animal movements” of his earliest years. Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia, read by Wordsworth during the composition of Lyrical Ballads, provides a context for both the phrase “animal movements” and Wordsworth’s own thoughts about the meaning of motion. With his four-fold schema of animal motion, embracing perception, cognition, and bodily processes as well as voluntary motion, Darwin depicts an animal organism for which motion is definitive, providing the foundation for the later development of a stable subject and its will. Wordsworth, by contrast, often evacuates motion from the subject in order to create a stable viewer in dialectical relation to an environment experienced as a landscape prospect, as exemplified by two episodes in “The Two-Part Prelude.”
January 2012: Nicholas M. Williams is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Individualized Major Program at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake and the editor of Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, and has published essays on Blake, William Godwin, Thomas Malthus, Mary Shelley, and others. He is currently working on a book on animation in Romantic literature.
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